context

C O N T E X T 1 7 9 : M A R C H 2 0 2 4 41 the building for the 2006 Mill Road Winter Fair, they had removed the county council’s inserted ceiling, revealing the full grandeur of the interior. A new permanent shrine with beautiful carved stones from Rajasthan was being installed at the north end, and a new kitchen and WCs to the south. A fundraising poster said that ‘all the internal work will be completed by March next year... we will start work to the outside to replace the eroded stone and brickwork sometime in May next year’. The ICCA ran out of funds and did not repair the outside as promised. The building continued to deteriorate. In 2011 the updated conservation area appraisal described it as a ‘Building at risk – the former Free Library, Mill Road: the building is in very poor condition despite being in use as a (non-city council) community centre.’ In 2013, following further chasing by the conservation officer, the ICCA submitted a listed building application, which was approved. The listed building situation was now regularised, but the city council’s 2013 draft local plan showed proposed housing on the depot site, while omitting the listed build- ing. I successfully challenged this. Visiting the former library in January 2016 for a workshop on the planning and development brief (supplementary development document, SPD) for the depot site, I was shocked to see serious water penetration through the roof and walls. In July, a city council officer responding to my representation claimed in a local plan hearing that the former library was not a building at risk. I responded with a summary building-at-risk report. Neither the draft SPD, nor July 2017 proposals by the Cambridge Investment Partnership (CIP, the city council and local developers Hill Residential), men- tioned the listed building at risk. Challenged at a city strategy and resources meeting, the director responsible said that ‘when submitted, the application would need to include listed building consent for the old library’. Later the council leader told my wife and me that he shared our love of the library and the area and our concern to get it right. Details would be in the report to the committee on 13 November, he said, but the aim was to retain the former library and look to see how it could be used. The CIP’s Phase 1 planning application for 184 dwellings on the depot site did not even mention the listed building as a building at risk. The former library was excluded from the application site; no listed building application was submitted. No consideration was given to site constraints and potential impacts on future viable use of the listed building, or how its significance might be sustained and enhanced through the proposals, as required by paragraph 131 of the NPPF. Historic England and the conservation officer objected to the height of proposed apartment blocks on the depot site and their impacts on the conservation area, but the committee report concluded that the public The former library after the removal of the inserted ceiling, with the new ICCA shrine under construction. The occasion was the 2006 Mill Road Winter Fair. A plan of the library by its architect, Thomas Waters